Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. January takes its name from the Roman god Janus, whose name means “gate.” Janus is shown with two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. It seems fitting, because this is a day when most of us look back at the year just past, and ahead to the year stretched out before us.

We have regrets for what we did, or failed to do, in the past year. We have hope for the year that lies before us like a field of freshly fallen snow. It is the custom in many cultures to make resolutions or promises for the new year.

Here at the Catholic Catalogue, we’re suggesting something better than resolutions. Go to confession this week. Allow God to put the past year away, and help you begin again turned round right.

“An old man was asked by a certain soldier if God received a penitent man. And, after heartening him with many words, he said to him at the last, ‘Tell me, beloved, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away?’ He said, ‘Nay, but I would patch it and wear it.’ The old man said to him, iIf you would spare your garment, shall not God have mercy on God’s own image?'”

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Quotes

Nuclear war threatens life on a previously unimaginable scale; public executions are fast becoming weekly events . . . and euthanasia is now openly discussed and even advocated. Each of these assaults on life has its own meaning and morality; they cannot be collapsed into one problem, but they must be confronted as pieces of a larger pattern.— Cardinal Bernardin

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